Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

  He is not here to help Noor and Alice save Zainab. That cause, he knows, is doomed. He is doing this for posterity. “Some people work around here. Others just want to live in TV sitcoms.” He looks at their collection of herbs and books with handwritten titles, and shouts, “This is a hospital, not a Sunday hobby club for herbalists. If you want to practise your mumbo-jumbo medicine, go and do it somewhere else.” Then he looks at Noor and says, “I mean, get back to your real job.”

  Dr Pereira’s impatience towards Alice Bhatti and Noor is that of a privileged person towards someone less fortunate, someone who has been granted an opportunity but is hell-bent on squandering it. Someone refusing to come out when the weather is nice. Someone insisting on wallowing in their own misfortunes when there is dancing on the street. Someone refusing to take part when history is being made. Dr Pereira is human enough to realise that Alice and Noor are not the authors of their own misfortunes, but he is not imaginative enough to recognise their desperate attempts to rewrite them.

  Noor has spent enough time in the hospital to know what they really think: they think that Sister Alice grew up in a gutter and still carries that stench. They think that Noor was born in a jail and grew up in these corridors and carries that odour associated with people who are born into slavery. Noor doesn’t know yet what real misery looks like. He will know only once he sees an open grave, a gash in the earth and Zainab draped in six yards of white cotton washed in Zamzam water from Mecca.

  “Something needs to change in this place,” says Dr Pereira, scribbling in the margins of Noor’s register. “Change is always good. Sister Hina Alvi tells me our maternity ward is a mess. Baby slaughterhouse, she calls it. That delivery room is a gambling den, she says. Everyone comes out a loser. You both are probably needed there. At least there are lives there that are worth saving.”

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Twenty-One

  The first rains of his married life bring the first murderous thoughts Teddy has ever had. And these are not even related to his search for not-Abu Zar or his attempts to stay away from Inspector Malangi. His rage is domestic; he is not sure if it’s because of his wife or the weather.

  Three days of torrential rains and the streets around Al-Aman turn into a swamp. Nobody can go out except little boys who have turned discarded tyres into their private pleasure boats and chase each other using cricket bats as oars. Teddy hasn’t left home for three days and increasingly feels like a trapped animal, rattling his cage, eyeing his fellow inmate with suspicion. Humidity crushes them like a fallen roof. The ceiling fan throws down hot gusts of wind like burning debris from a building on fire. Alice is lying on her back wearing just a shirt and no shalwar. What kind of woman goes around the house without her shalwar? He is not used to having Alice here during the day, and he is certain he’ll never get used to having Alice here without her shalwar during the day. He keeps thinking, shouldn’t she be at the Sacred? Aren’t people drowning or being roasted by faulty electric wires? Alice has been trying to tell him about some dead rich begum with the unlikely name of Qaz, and her unruly brats in the VIP room. Is there a rich begum in the world who doesn’t have unruly brats? What are you supposed to do in a VIP room if not behave badly? What is wrong with a Surf and bodyguards? He himself drives around in a Hilux with bodyguards. Does that make him a devil?

  For the first few days, marriage smelled like lemony disinfectant and love-soaked bedsheets. Their comings and goings gave their lives a certain rhythm; little surprises in the pot on the stove, mock scolding about did you do your weight training today, and their hurried lovemaking on the doormat as Alice kept whispering, I am getting late for work.

  Now, as Teddy is housebound and Alice goes around taking down curtains and washing them, clearing out kitchen cabinets and screaming every time she sees anything that looks like a cockroach, Teddy feels he is being throttled by the wet rag that Alice has just used to wipe the bathroom floor. Must be the weather, he tells himself. Then he notices that Alice has rearranged his weights according to their size. But in the wrong order. No, it’s not the weather. He wants to take that twenty-kilogram bumper plate and crush her head with it. He is alarmed at the visuals that accompany that thought in his mind and looks at Alice to see if she can tell what he has been thinking. She is sprawled on the sofa. Still no shalwar. Teddy lies down at her feet. They are like two beached crabs, disoriented, not sure which way they should crawl to get back to the ocean.

  Teddy has never had any murderous thoughts before. In fact, he has almost no flair for physical violence. Those who have followed his career might think that he does it for a living, dashing from one atrocity to another, but no, he has only ever been what is called an accessory to murder, the clean-up guy, the one who keeps watch, the one who removes the wallet and ID cards and any other valuables from the body but has never aspired to the main job. He has always done it with a certain level of detachment. He has never had any personal motivation, so he has never felt angry, and hence there has never been any remorse, no nightmares about gagged men pleading in animal voices, no visions of slit throats and foreheads with bullet holes. Basically, he only provides valet parking for the angels of death. He has secretly planned that if he does get a full-time job offer from the G Squad, he’ll take it but later get himself transferred to Traffic, where you never have to touch anyone and people start stuffing your pockets as soon as you take out your challan book. Though now that not-Abu Zar seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth, Teddy is not likely to be offered a proper police job. There is more chance of him being forced to take not-Abu Zar’s job, which would last about half a second. All he’ll have to do is to wait for a bullet in the head.

  He thinks maybe he’ll branch out into personal training or private security. He knows that people run post-pregnancy-flat-stomach-in-three-weeks workouts and make more money than the sharpest member of the G Squad. He also knows that someone of his build can be sitting in the front seat of an air-conditioned Mercedes, holding doors open and waiting outside wedding parties where you get to eat the same food that the guests eat. But doing squats with young mothers or providing armed protection to rich kids has always seemed a bit effeminate to him. When he sees fitness instructors with their gym bags and second-hand Nike tights, or personal security guards with their cocked berets and Uzis slung off their shoulders, he sees nothing but glorified Filipino maids. He might as well start wearing a kimono and become a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Or are those Japanese?

  But these decisions are not his to make. He is not going anywhere till he finds not-Abu Zar, and how can he find not-Abu Zar if he can’t leave the house? How can he even plan a proper search if his woman walks around all day without a shalwar?

  He was going to go about it in a systematic way; he had got a sketch drawn and then had one thousand copies printed. Now one thousand images of not-Abu Zar sit in the cupboard, away from Alice’s prying eyes. Official documents, she was told. Now he can’t even go out and put these posters on the walls. Looking down into the deluge from the window, it occurs to him that maybe he should make paper boats out of them and send them out into the world.

  Teddy tries to curb the onslaught of images of heads being crushed under bodybuilding plates. Malangi has told him that most murderers are stay-at-home types. He should get out as soon as the water recedes. Malangi has also told him that when trapped at home, look at your woman from a different angle, pretend she is someone else’s wife (“Don’t pretend that she is Mrs Malangi, because, trust me, you don’t want to”). Forget what she is saying; try and get to know her body.

  Teddy concentrates on Alice Bhatti’s shapely ankle and reminds himself that it is his wife’s ankle. This leg is his wife’s leg. He kisses her ankle and then cups her kneecap as if marking her body bit by bit, convincing himself that it belongs to him. “You smell nice, Mrs Butt,” he says, nuzzling the back of her knee with his nose.

  “I smell like something the cat dragged in,” she
responds, withdrawing her leg, then she puts her heel on the nape of his neck and gently massages it.

  Teddy Butt can see all the way up between her legs where a few wiry hairs jut out of her white panties. He feels a mixture of disgust and desire, like a devout person who is hungry but can’t decide whether the fare on offer is halal or not. The ceiling fan suddenly moves faster in its doomed assault on humidity.

  “You can use my wax if you want,” Teddy Butt says kindly, as if offering her a lick from his ice-cream cone.

  Alice grabs his hand, pulls it to her panties and presses it against herself. “This is a woman’s body, not a baby girl’s. Did you want a baby girl as your wife?”

  Teddy’s face reddens and he gets a sudden urge to punch her between her legs. He doesn’t fancy baby girls, he has never thought of baby girls; he thinks baby girls are babies. He controls his anger, withdraws his hand, then moves it on Alice’s smooth calf, gently, like a bar of soap gliding on her sweaty leg.

  “In our Book it says that women shouldn’t keep those hairs longer than a grain of rice.” He can’t remember where he has read or heard this, at a Friday sermon maybe, or in the Friday supplement of a newspaper perhaps; he is not sure, but he is certain that he is not making it up. It sounds authentic and reasonable. It’s specific but not stingy, something that most women can comply with, a true hallmark of all universal religions. “It’s about hygiene, especially in a climate like ours.”

  “Basmati?” Alice says. Suddenly it seems they are a couple trying to decide what to cook for dinner.

  “You are making fun?” Teddy props himself on his elbow and stares into her eyes, trying to decide if she really is making fun of him. “Are you making fun of my religion? You know that I am not very religious, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to make fun of anyone’s beliefs.”

  “No, I am just asking a practical question. No offence, but you don’t really go shopping, so you have no idea. You go to Sunday bazaar and you ask for rice and they’ll ask you which one. That’s all I am asking. There are about twelve varieties. They range from this, to this…” She demonstrates with her forefinger and thumb, the whole range, from tiny broken grain to genetically enhanced, almost vulgar-looking Kala Shah Kakoo basmati. “One needs to be specific. Especially if it’s God’s word. It can be dangerous if it’s vague. Choose the wrong variety of rice and you burn in hell for eternity.”

  Teddy is not sure if she is mocking him. Women make you weak and impotent because they make perfectly normal men feel they are fools, Inspector Malangi has told him. You go to work and people think you have an analytical mind, you are an expert of some sort on something. You walk down your street and people ask for your advice because they think you are a man of the world, and then you go home and you start discussing weather with your wife or the damp in the walls and she will prove in an instant that you are the world’s biggest idiot. That’s exactly how he feels now. You can’t even have a conversation about body hair without being accused of paedophilia and bigotry.

  He makes a mental note to ask a G Squad member who is an expert on matters of religion.

  “Will you help me move this bed? We might get some air if we put it against the window.”

  Teddy gets up quietly. Together they move the bed, and now they can see a broken-mirror-tiled minaret while lying in bed but there is still no wind.

  “Will you try and get a regular job?” Alice runs her fingers up his back, hoping to change the topic.

  “What is wrong with my job?”

  “Let’s see. Hours are strange. You don’t really get paid regularly.”

  “I do get paid.”

  Teddy thinks that on some special calendar for wives, today must be humiliate-your-husband day.

  “You also do night shifts.”

  “But that’s part of my work.”

  “And what I do is not part of my work?”

  Alice starts to massage his shoulders, which stiffen up under her prodding fingers.

  “Your work is dangerous. I can never get sand out of your clothes.”

  “We live in dangerous times. We live in a dangerous place. It’s better to know the danger, to work with it, to tame it.”

  Teddy wonders if he has begun to talk like Inspector Malangi. Soon he’ll be worrying about his wife’s shopping habits and his kids’ homework.

  Then he remembers his own homework: a pile of not-Abu Zar’s posters waiting for him in the cupboard.

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Twenty-Two

  Alice Bhatti sends for Sister Hina Alvi when she realises that the baby is stuck flat, a situation that she has never dealt with before. The girl has been in labour for fourteen hours. When Alice Bhatti took over the previous night, the eighteen-year-old mother was already fully dilated. Since then it has been a series of false alarms. Alice Bhatti is holding her hand, ignoring her screams, which alternate between yelling and chanting slogans of Ya Ali as if she was a new convert at a Shia procession. Alice Bhatti wishes Dr Pereira was here rather than supervising the breaking of bread and sipping of lemon bloody squash at the Holy Trinity church. There is no one to help except Noor, who follows her instructions with his eyes to the floor and refuses to look up. This screaming girl almost his own age thrashing around on the bed reminds him of certain nights in the Borstal. There was a teenage girl from Balochistan who started to scream when her period pains started and refused to shut up even when they locked her in a solitary cell. On those nights Noor would cover his ears and tremble through the night. Noor who doesn’t flinch when he sees shattered limbs on the A&E floor, Noor who can do twelve stitches in three minutes, all the while reassuring his patient that anaesthesia is on the way, Noor who is generally immune to any kind of gore can’t stand the battle that this woman on the bed is waging against her own body. Even now, between handing Sister Alice scalpels and spirits, he turns towards the wall and cups his ears with his hands, like a child turning away from a particularly horrific scene in a movie.

  When Sister Hina Alvi enters the delivery room, this is how she finds Noor, sticking to the wall in a corner. Sister Hina Alvi is fanning herself with her dupatta, her lips are chapped crimson and the first thing she does is expel Noor from the room. “Somebody must have given you birth, or did you just fall out of the sky? Now run along, go see if your mother is dead yet. We need that bed,” Hina Alvi says, pulling on her gloves. She stands over Alice Bhatti, who is preparing a scalpel and scissors for a cut.

  “When did you take her vitals?”

  “Forty-five minutes ago. She is all there, strong as a horse. But this thing is like a brick, refusing to move.” Alice Bhatti puts the girl’s file in front of Sister Hina Alvi.

  “Why are you girls so fond of cutting up people? Let her do the hard work. Nobody tells them of the consequences when they open their legs for someone. When will she learn if she doesn’t learn now?” Hina Alvi bends down to take a closer look, then starts massaging the girl’s belly, first softly then vigorously in downward motions. She puts her ear to her stomach and closes her eyes for a few moments. Then she lifts her head, and Alice can tell from her eyes what thirty-five years of bedside experience has told her: Sister Hina Alvi believes that the baby is dead.

  This irritates Alice Bhatti. This experience, this knowledge that brings you the news of death before you can see it with your own eyes. A death before birth. She feels as if she has failed in some basic way. Has she worked for fourteen hours to bring a dead baby into this world? Has this poor girl, with no father or any other relative in sight, nurtured this soul so that it is returned to the Lord before she can hear the baby’s first scream?

  Can He take something from you before He has given it to you?

  Sister Hina asks for a scalpel and gets busy between the girl’s legs. Alice Bhatti holds the girl’s head in the crook of her arm, takes her hand and gently urges her to push. The girl pushes, but it seems she is trying to take an impossible shit. After fifty minutes of the girl pushi
ng and Sister Hina Alvi prodding with the scalpel, a tiny hand emerges. It is bluish in colour and hangs out like a big wart. Hina Alvi stands up exasperated, takes a deep breath, then bends down again, pushes the hand back and tries to align the head in the right direction by inserting two fingers and manoeuvring them in an attempt to hook an elbow or the neck. She works with the resigned concentration of someone who has pulled out too many dead babies from their mother’s wombs.

  An hour later they bring into this world an oval wrinkly head, a smudge of a face with streaks of thin black hair. The girl has passed out from the effort. A shudder passes through her body periodically, as if the dead baby, still connected to her, is sending her signals, asking her to come with him.

  Sister Hina Alvi turns the baby upside down, slaps its back. It hangs there like a skinned kitten, its body covered in splotches of blood, which is the only evidence that this thing might have been alive at some point. She wraps it in a sheet and puts it by its mother’s side. “She’ll want to see the fruit of her love when she wakes up. Poor thing, I know, but it might teach her a lesson,” says Hina Alvi.

  Nobody mentions the fact that the baby is a boy, a dead boy but a boy.